Animality as an excuse for murder: David Grann and Killers of the Flower Moon

Abstract

This paper examines the investigative nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, which explores a series of murders of vulnerable members of the Osage tribe that took place in northeastern Oklahoma between 1918 and 1931. Grann’s account reveals how white citizens, ranchers, and townsfolk conspired against their Native American neighbors in a scheme involving poisoning, arson, deception, and falsified death certificates. The direct motivation for these crimes was greed triggered by income from oil deposits discovered in the land where the Osage were relocated after a century of broken treaties and other misfortunes. Furthermore, the paper explores how the supposed animality of the victims was employed to conceal and excuse genocidal tendencies against Native tribes, and how contemporary Native American accounts attest to their sense of unreality, resulting in the unclear status and uncanny subsistence of a living person reduced to the status of a ghost. In a broader perspective this paper discusses the colonization of America and its impact on the indigenous tribes who already inhabited the land. The demeaning metaphor of Indians as beasts yielded to a more palatable representation of the Noble Savage, but the accusations of bestiality returned when the tribes attempted to protect their way of living. The colonizers believed that by not cultivating the land and not building large, permanent communities, the indigenous tribes had forfeited their title to the land; those who resisted were conveniently labeled as pests to justify their inevitable erasure. The paper recalls rarely cited evidence, dating back to the history of the suppression of the 1652 Irish rebellion, to examine the multitudinous ways in which language played an important part in justifying the supposed animality of the indigenous people and eradicating them to make room for governmentauthorized settlers.